Tales of Halloween Movie Review – Anthology at its Best

Runtime: 92 minutes

Release Date: October 16,2015

Rating: R

Director: Lots!

Tales of Halloween is an anthology flick that weaves together 10 different stories that take place over the course of Halloween. Packed with cameos from writers, directors, and actors featured in other horror films, it's entertaining for those who love 70s and 80s slasher and horror films.

Adrienne Barbeau, who any horror fan will remember from films like The Fog, plays a DJ at the beginning of the film. She does a great job of introducing each segment and wrapping up the movie in the end. Her smooth and sultry voice definitely creates a setting that will make you feel like you're back in the glory days of the drive through watching all your favorites.

On first glance, Tales of Halloween seems like one of those movies that only has one or two good stories. When describing it to my roommate, it started telling him about my favorite anthology story, then remembered another one I liked, then another, and wound up telling him to just watch the damn thing. While some stories are definitely stronger than others, there really aren't a lot of bad stories.

The best might be The Ransom of Rusty Rex. Two men decide to kidnap the child of a rich man, one of who is played by Sam Witwer of Being Human, as he goes trick or treating by himself. When they call his father, played by the amazing John Landis, he laughs and tells them to keep the kid. They quickly learn that this little boy is actually a demon and that once he latches on, he never lets go.

Friday the 31^st is a close second. This story opens with a girl dressed as Dorothy running for her life through the woods with a deformed slasher, a la Jason, on her tails. After he catches and kills her though, a space ship appears in the sky, and drops an adorable little claymation alien on the ground. When he denies the alien's wish to trick or treat, the alien takes over the woman's body and chases the killer around. While it may not sound like much, it got the most laughs out of me, especially when the slasher wound up losing his arm and later his head because of his own tools of death.

Trick is probably the one that has the best ending, though it takes awhile to get going. Two couples kick back on Halloween night as they have a few drinks and smoke. A girl dressed up as a witch shows up to trick or treat and then brutally murders the man who answers the front door. Several other kids then show up and chase the adults through the house, killing them one by one. In the end, we learn that the adults had a little fun of their own mutilating and killing children.

I was also a fan of The Night Billy Raised Hell. Billy is stuck trick or treating with his slutty teenage sister and her boyfriend. The boyfriend convinces poor Billy to play a prank on a man living in one specific house. It turns out that the man is actually the Devil, played by the awesome Barry Bostwick, who promises to show Billy some new tricks. They then set out on a night of mischief filled with robbing convenience stores and murdering people. When the cops show up to arrest poor Billy though, it turns out that the Devil left him tied up and stole his costume for one of his minions, leaving Billy to take the wrap.

Keep your eyes peeled for cameos from Lin Shaye, Barbara Crampton, John Savage, and Joe Dante just to name a few. Tales of Halloween is currently streaming on Netflix and is more than a fun way to waste 93 minutes.

VHS Viral (V/H/S: Viral) Movie Review

Runtime: 82 minutes
Release Date: October 23, 2014
Rating: R
Director: A whole bunch of peeps


A guy and girl introduce us to the world of VHS Viral. They aren't that interesting but serve as the wraparound for the movie. He's obsessed with filming something that will go viral and sees his chance when a police chase happens right outside his apartment. When his girlfriend follows him, he spends most of the movie trying to chase her down.


Dante the Great is our first major story. Dante is something of a white trash loser when he finds a magic cape that turns him into a famous magician. Unfortunately, the cape is also home to a monster that needs fed hot young girls to survive. When his assistant discovers his secret, will she help him or turn the tables on him?


Parallel Monsters is the second story and the one that made me scream. Alfonso is working in his basement when his hot wife shows up and asks him to come upstairs. Though he agrees, he waits until she leaves before revealing his experiment, which is a portal into another world. Turns out that the man on the other side is his exact double, but when the two switch places, one will quickly find that the other world is nothing like what he expected.


Last up is Bonestorm, which is almost more annoying than the wraparound story. A group of what looks like spoiled rich kids with too much time on their hands spend way too long filming themselves skateboarding and acting like thugs before deciding to take a little trip to TJ. Once there, they find themselves stalked by a weird cult that they wind up attacking head on.


The VHS movies are a little hit or miss with me. Some of the stories stick with me, but others are pretty forgettable. After watching VHS Viral, I'm not sure I'll really remember any of these stories. Parallel Monsters was the most entertaining and had the most WTF ending of all of the stories, but I probably liked Dante the Great the most. Bonestorm lost me from the very beginning and had a hard time keeping my attention once it got going.


Vicious Circles, which is the wraparound story felt a little pointless when compared to the wraparound stories in the other movies. Instead of giving us a story and introducing us to actual videotapes, we got a guy racing around town on a motorcycle and using his cell phone to see footage. There was one gruesome scene where a guy got stuck on a runaway vehicle and had his feet drug along the ground that made me wince, and made my roommate, a guy I might add who studies nursing, to actually turn away from the television. The rest of the story was just kind of "eh" and I wasn't too crazy about the ending.


I get what the filmmakers wanted to do. They wanted to update the concept of VHS and make it fit more with the modern age. How many people really have a VCR in their homes now? More and more people now use YouTube and watch movies online, which fits with the theme of the movie. Unfortunately, it kind of felt to me like this was a movie trying too hard to appeal to teens and younger audiences, which wound up alienating me a little. I might not be a teen, but I still love my horror movies!

"Tales from the Darkside: The Movie" – Beware of Well-Dressed Women

Runtime: 93 minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: May 4, 1990

Director: John Harrison

Timmy (Matthew Lawrence) makes the mistake of wandering into the kitchen of Betty (Deborah Harry), who just so happens to be in the mood for little boy stew. She gives him a book of fairy tales that are a little dark and twisted to tide him over, and he decides to read her a few to hopefully distract her until he can find a way to escape.

When I was younger, I always loved the "Lot 249" segment, which is the first in the film. The segment stars Steve Buscemi as a graduate student who discovers that his quasai-girlfriend, played by Julianne Moore, cheated on him and tried to steal from him. Her younger brother, played by Christian Slater, saves the day, but not before his sister and her lover die. In the end, Buscemi brings her back from the dead to get revenge on her brother.

"Cat from Hell" is the typical middle story in films like this. It involves an older man, who thinks that a black cat living in his house is evil. He offers a hitman $100,000 to kill the cat. The cat stalks the man all night, and when the older man comes back, he discovers that the cat actually suffocated the hitman by stuffing itself down his throat. In the end, the cat kills the old man too.

My favorite story in the film now is the last one, titled "Lover's Vow." James Remar plays a man who sees a gargoyle kill a man in a dark ally. The gargoyle promises to let him live as long as he never tells anyone what he saw. That same night, he meets Rae Dawn Chong and falls helplessly in love with her. After several years of marriage and having two kids together, he tells her what happened the night that they met. She turns into the gargoyle, kills him, and becomes statues with their kids. Oh and in the end, Timmy traps Betty in her own oven and presumably lives happily ever after.

“V/H/S” Movie Review

Runtime: 116 minutes

Rating: R

Release Date:

Director: Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti Wet, Glen McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, Radio Silence

A bunch of loser guys like to film themselves running around town like crazy people and doing shit like ripping woman's shirts up on video. After selling some of their footage as porn, they learn that they can make even more money by breaking into a house and stealing a video from the owner. After gaining access to the home, they discover the dead body of an old man in front of a television. While going through the videos in his house, they start disappearing one by one.

“V/H/S” has a few different segments that are shown as the videos that the thieves watch. One involves three men who use a hidden camera to catch themselves having sex with women on film. They bring back two women to their hotel room, only to discover that she's a crazed psycho who may or may not be human. Second two revolves around a couple on their honeymoon. Weird things keep happening at every hotel they stay in, and someone finally takes their video camera to capture them as they sleep on their last night together.

Segment three follows a group of friends on a camping trip in the woods. One of the girls, Wendy, tells them that she was the survivor of a mass murder in the same woods. They don't believe her until the killer comes after them one by one. The fourth segment, and my favorite, focuses on a young couple talking over video chat because they are across the country from each other. Emily keeps experiencing weird things around her apartment and becomes convinced that it's haunted. While chatting with him, he sees a little child running through the apartment. The ending is a little twisted and completely unexpected.

The last segment is about four best friends who go to a Halloween party. When they don't find anyone else at the house, they decide that it must be a haunted house. They make their way through the house until they find a group of men screaming at a woman who is chained to the walls of the attic. After helping her escape, they discover that they should have left her hanging.

“V/H/S” is definitely an odd little film. Some of the segments are much stronger than others, but I get the feeling that everyone will like one more than the others. My favorite was segment four, if only for the job that I got when the little kid came out of nowhere. A friend was more of a fan of the last segment, which reminded him of the old Resurrection Mary legend.

The wraparound story wasn't as good as it could have been. There aren't many scares, and it seems to drag on a little too long. Jumping back to the story in between the other segments is sometimes confusing and often distracting. I think the directors could have cut a few of the wraparound segments to focus more on the individual segments/short films, which were far more entertaining.

It's been a few days since I watched it, and damn if that one story didn't stick with me! I found myself telling other friends about a girl getting a C-section done on her in the middle of her own living room and how another scene made me literally jump out of my seat. Even if I never watch the film again, I can't imagine myself forgetting about that one little segment.